2326 Last evening I was routinely surfing the Web, when my dial-up connection "unexpectedly disconnected." That's not an unusual occurrence with the crummy ISP service I get here, but what was unusual is what happened next. My iBook then just went dead. The screen went black, and I got no response from the Power key or the Control-Option-Command-Power Key reset combination.

Well, not quite dead; the sleep light was on and obliviously blinking away, but nothing would awaken the iBook from its comatose state. I was thanking providence that I had just done a global file backup the night before, but I remembered that a similar phenomenon had happened once before, back in June, 2005.

That time I was also doing some routine task, when all of a sudden, with no warning, the machine just quit. The screen went black and the hard drive stopped. As with last night, pressing the Power key had no effect, nor did pressing the Power Manager reset key combination.

On both occasions, I unplugged the power adapter, removed the battery for a few minutes, pressed the Power Manager reset sequence again, reinserted the battery, plugged in the power supply, and to my relief, was rewarded with the start-up chime. The iBook booted and everything seemed in order except that the battery was flat dead, showing 0 percent charge. However, it commenced recharging, and came back up to 100 percent over the next couple of hours or so.

A Google search turned up various power management - related issues with iBooks, but nothing that sounded exactly like this.

The complete loss of battery charge that occurred in both instances is a puzzler. The battery itself seemed to be in fine fettle after the first incident, and has worked fine ever since until this episode.

Anyway, if anyone has any insight to share on this sudden quit thing, let me know.

Charles W. Moore

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